TAKEN AT BIRTH
JANE BLASIO WENT LOOKING FOR HER BIOLOGICAL PARENTS AND UNEARTHED A SCANDAL SHE WAS ONE OF HUNDREDS OF INFANTS ILLEGALLY SOLD FROM A US CLINIC IN THE ’ S AND ’
Jane Blasio was 6 years old the day she learned she was adopted. She and her older sister Michelle, 11, had been taunted on the playground of their Akron school by classmates who called them “blackmarket babies”, adding, “you were both bought”. When Michelle told their parents, the girls’ dad, James, sat them down and said, “We have something to tell you …” Their mother, Joan, continued: “You two were adopted. Do you know what that means?” Blasio admits she had “no clue” what her parents were talking about. “Michelle was crying,” she says, “and I just wanted to escape to play in the backyard.”
Yet what she learned that day – and what remained unsaid – would change the course of Jane’s life forever. In 1988, sensing that her parents hadn’t told her everything, the then-23-year-old began a search for her birth parents – and uncovered a scandal. The tiny Hicks Clinic in McCaysville, Georgia, where she was born was actually the centre of an illegal adoption ring that had sold over 200 children to out-of-town couples during the ’50s and ’60s. Blasio would spend more than three decades helping other “Hicks babies” and birth parents in their efforts to reconnect, and following a winding
road to the truth about her own roots. Her journey and the story of the Hicks clinic are the subject of the TLC series Taken at Birth, which began airing in 2019. Now, in a new memoir of the same name, Blasio, 56, takes a deeper look at her incredible life. “Some days,” she says, “I just sit and think, ‘How could all of this have happened?’”
Blasio started looking for answers early. As a child, she was perplexed by the way her parents and other relatives would often fall silent when she entered a room. “There was this shroud of secrecy about things,” she recalls. When she was 12 she saw a copy of her birth certificate, which falsely listed Joan and James as her birth parents and her birthplace as the Hicks Clinic in McCaysville. “I started going to the library and doing research,” she says. “I learned all about Dr Hicks and how he lost his licence in 1964 for performing abortions.”
It wasn’t until after Joan’s death from cancer in 1988 that Blasio, who was newly married and studying criminal justice at the University of Akron while working for local private investigators (“I’ve always been really good at snooping”), got the full story of her adoption. “Before she died, my mother said, ‘I told your dad to tell you the truth,’” Blasio says. He did. Doctors had told Joan she couldn’t have children, and Jane’s aunt had found a doctor who would connect couples with babies in exchange for cash. A truck driver, James had been a cop until he was caught fencing stolen property, so “he knew [that Hicks’ actions were illegal],” Jane says. “But he was going to do whatever would make my mum happy.” The revelation left Blasio angry. “My parents bought a child,” she says, “in a way that gave me no option but to search and possibly find no answers. That’s not love, that’s desperation.”
In 1988 she made her first trip to McCaysville and stood in the alley behind Hicks’ longshuttered clinic, where years earlier a nurse had handed Jane to the couple waiting in their car after James had paid the $1000 fee (Michelle was purchased four years earlier for $800). “I wanted to get inside so badly,” recalls Blasio. “Just to see what it felt like in there.”
Though Hicks had died in 1972, locals in the copper-mining town initially remained protective of the family doctor who’d allowed residents to pay their bills by bartering. But Blasio, with the help of a sympathetic local judge, eventually uncovered some 200 birth certificates of children just like her, born between 1952 and 1965, whose adoptive parents Hicks had listed as the birth parents. Still focused primarily on her own search, Blasio spoke
“Did my father know it was illegal? Hell, yes. My mother? She didn’t want to know” BLASIO
to an Akron newspaper in 1997 hoping it would help. It opened the floodgates: she was inundated with calls from other Hicks babies and from birth mothers, many with harrowing stories. “Half of the women had their babies taken from them without their knowledge,” Blasio says. “They were told their baby died or they went there thinking they were having an abortion and then the baby was sold.” She ended up creating a DNA database (sites like ancestry.com were not yet analysing DNA) and went to work connecting Hicks babies with relatives. “It’s hard to describe how good it feels to do that,” she says.
Months after the newspaper article appeared, she thought she’d found her own biological mother: a woman named Kitty who had given birth to a daughter at the clinic in January 1965 – her family members said Blasio was her spitting image. Kitty had died in 1983, but Blasio spent more than 17 years getting to know her family before advanced DNA testing in 2015 proved Kitty wasn’t her mother.
In 2017 Blasio submitted her DNA to ancestry.com and eventually found her way to her father, a World War II B-17 tail gunner who had died in 2010. She located her sister Michelle’s birth mother in 2017, but Michelle had died of cancer just months earlier. And there was more disappointment: Blasio’s own biological mother, now in her 70s, let it be known through family members that she wasn’t interested in being contacted by her daughter. “She has the right to her privacy, and that’s OK,” Blasio insists. “Just to be able to know who my family is and where I come from is enough.”
She’s gotten to know her biological aunts and uncles – “a good group of people” – and continues to help other Hicks babies.
Bobby Falcone, 57, a Tampa food salesman, contacted her last year after spotting Hicks’ name on his birth certificate. Together they found his birth father, and Blasio accompanied him to their first meeting on June 26 (see sidebar). “Jane has become like a sister to me,” Falcone says.
Divorced since 2000, Blasio lives outside of Akron with her two dogs. Her adoptive father, James, died in 1995. She’s planning another trip to McCaysville soon – she may have a lead on the whereabouts of files she believes Hicks hid. “I set out on this journey to find my heritage,” she says. “In the end I realised the real journey is learning how to be at peace with what you find or don’t.”
Among the finds she treasures most is something she hadn’t expected: the strength to forgive her adoptive parents. “As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to understand their desperation — and their pain,” she says.
She may have spent her Baywatch days running along the beaches of California in her iconic red one-piece, but Pamela Anderson is officially saying goodbye to the West Coast – having recently sold her Malibu home for a cool $16 million. Having lived in the house for 21 years, Anderson had to say a bittersweet goodbye, made better only by the fact she’s settling down in Vancouver, Canada, with new hubby Dan Hayhurst.
“It’s time I went back to my roots,” the star told WHO’s sister publication People of the move back to her home country. “I’m creating my life [in Vancouver] again,
where it all started. It’s been a wild ride, now full circle.”
Upon her purchase of the property in 2000, the now-54-year-old completely remodelled the home – creating a minioasis with a huge main house and a onebedroom guest house now sitting on the 587 square metre site. But while the home has plenty of indoor space, it’s the outdoor areas that really make it a stand-out.
A rooftop deck, pool, hot tub, vegetable garden and fire pit encourage the occupants to get outdoors. Plus, the property boasts its own private lagoon and access to a coveted slice of Malibu beach.
“Many sexy, fun times were had here,” Anderson told the New York Post when the property hit the market – with surely more to be had for the new owners!
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